Alex Kershaw – international and regional security blog

Conflict is dangerous, expensive, politically and economically charged and can have alternate meanings for the various groups involved in it. In this blog I aim to highlight and summarise some of the reasons behind why war has in some cases fostered positive externalities and how these externalities have helped shape the nation states.

Conflict can be seen as one of the main stimuluses’ to development and creation of norms and practices that are still articulated today. Jeffery Herbst and Samuel Huntingdon both argue that war in europe helped motivate leaders to take a number of steps that meant that development could occur. These steps included firstly; that elites had to create systems of taxation in order to support their conflicts and thus bureaucratic systems emerged. Secondly, conflict also can be seen as having played a major role in the development of nationalism in Europe, based on the fact that an external threat has the power to unite those being threatened.

The process of the need to create systems of tax can be seen across many nations who have been under threat from an external enemy. Taiwan and South Korea as Herbst notes, are able to extract large amounts of resources from their societies because they can argue that it is necessary in order to protect one’s self from the external thereat which in this case is North Korea and China respectively. The creation of tax systems helps to increase state wealth, whilst also increasing the links between people and their states as they increase their points of communication.

Nationalism in many cases goes hand in hand with conflict. Many stories that are seen as national legends involve discussion of some conflict. This can be seen in Canada with the remembrance of the conflicts including the WW1 that are remembered with symbols such as the poppy and a national holiday. These help create a sense of unity within countries such as Canada and encourage citizens feel close to the state.

There can be an argument made that many developing nations, and in particular African nations have not received the positive externalities of conflict that states in places like Europe were able to achieve. Herbst argues that in Africa since the end of colonization, conflict has primarily been present within a nation’s borders and interstate conflict has been minimal with no countries having been invaded by another. With this lack of conflict it could be argued states have not been able to foster this sense of national unity or create systems of taxation that can support development.

I would argue that the analyses of Africa is flawed and that you cannot really prescribe war as a means of development, it however does raise interesting points and I believe there is a validity into linking development of nation states and systems of taxation to conflict. Overall i believe there are more negatives than positives that come from conflict however i have tried to provide an alternate viewpoint through which we can look at interstate conflict